Duo Pepicelli - Busoni: Complete Works for Cello & Piano (2004)

Best remembered for his beefy transcriptions of Bach and as a virtuoso pianist of wide influence, Ferruccio Busoni is touted on this Naxos disc as an important twentieth century composer whose works have fallen into neglect. But this back cover note is misleading, for very little here is really Busoni's, and those few pieces date from 1878 to 1886, and are therefore products of the nineteenth century. The slim program is padded with Ottorino Respighi's Adagio con variazioni, for strained biographical reasons, and Busoni's transcriptions for cello and piano of Bach's Chromatic Fantasia and Liszt's Valse oubliée are counted among his "complete works." Only three original compositions remain, a modest handful that makes the disc's title seem hyperbolic. The Kleine Suite for cello and piano, composed by Busoni in his twenties, is a pastiche of Bach's style, but it also owes a debt to Brahms in its rich harmonies and lyrical expression. The Serenata in G minor and Kultaselle, a set of ten variations on a Finnish folk song, are ambitious student works that show Busoni's early development as a keyboard wizard, but his writing for cello is cautious and unexceptional. Pianist Angelo Pepicelli and his brother, cellist Francesco Pepicelli, give energetic performances, and the recorded sound is acceptable.